userinit.exe deleted

[Guest]

I have 40, WindowsXP Pro w/SP1 or 2, PCs that are set to reboot every morning
using psshutdown. I have been using this utility for about a month with no
issues and don't believe it to be part of the issue but just providing as
much info as possible. The PCs have autologon set to true. 4 of the PCs after
rebooting continued looping at the logon screen, logging on and immediately
off. After some research it appeared that the file userinit.exe was missing.
I connected to each of these PCs across the network and copied the missing
userinit file and this resolved the issue.

No programs have been removed or added to the PCs recently and there is no
anti-spyware software installed on the PCs. I do have Norton Antivirus 7.5
installed. I ran a complete check on 1 of the 4 PCS for viruses and spyware
using several products and found no issues.

Simply replacing the missing file resolved the issue. The 4 PCs effected all
play the same role so there is some risk that the damage was intentional but
I doubt that this file could be deleted while the PC is logged on. My
question is what could have caused this problem in the first place?

 

[Guest]

Could be spyware. Norton AV does not cover spyware. You say you don't have
any anti-spyware installed on your 40 machines. Why not? You are not
invulnerable. In fact you are 40 times more vulnerable than I am!

To save costs, why not put SpyBot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's AdAware,
which are both free, on all of your machines, and then see what shows up. It
an't hurt.

 

[Guest]

The network is isolated for the most part. You have to way the probabilty of
being hit with spyware against the performance hit and interference often
associated with antispyware. These PCs are not general user PCs. They run
production applications in a limited capacity. My question though is how the
files were deleted.